How to Choose a Good SEO Company for Your Business or Website - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

When it comes to choosing a reputable company to manage your SEO, there's both a right way and a wrong way to go about the hiring process. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies common pitfalls to avoid and advice to take when it comes to selecting an agency or consultant to optimize your site for search engines. SEOs, take note: there are great ideas here for how to market yourselves to clients, as well!

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to choose a good SEO company, a consultant or an agency. It could be an independent person. What I want to do as we get into this is help you to understand some of the mechanics behind SEO consulting work. This is a critical hire, because if SEO is important to your business, then the choice of which company or person to use is going to have a huge impact, probably one of the biggest impacts on whether you get great results. There are a bunch of mistakes that people make when they go down this selecting an SEO company path.

Don't make these mistakes

Mistake #1: Using Google as your filter

The logic makes a lot of sense here if you think about it simplistically. Simplistic thinking is a good SEO company will do a great job ranking for SEO company or SEO consultant or SEO consultant plus my city name. So if I'm looking for the best SEO in Seattle, I have only to Google "best SEO Seattle" and surely the number-one company will show up at the top. But, unfortunately, what happens is most of the very good companies, the ones that are in high demand, the ones that do consistently great work and get great referrals, they don't actually need to rank here. They're overwhelmed with clients all the time because their clients refer them to people and lots of people in their network refer folks to them. They have a high retention of clients. Lots of people are very satisfied. They're making plenty of money and they're incredibly busy, so they don't spend any work optimizing their own website to get new clients.

As a result, you are often left with some of the dregs here. Many of the companies that rank well for best SEO plus city name or best SEO plus a region or plus a particular specialty, like best ecommerce SEO, are not the best. They are, in fact, the folks who are simply without any client work and so they're concentrating all their energy on trying to get new clients. Sometimes, maybe, you can find some good folks in there. It's just not a great filter.

Mistake #2: Trusting "Top SEO" lists

Many people will search for "best SEOs" or "best SEO consultants" or "best SEO companies," "best SEO companies United States." They'll get to a website like, I don't know, bestSEOs.com or topSEOs.com. There are a number of these types of websites that are essentially just aggregators. Their business model is they try and rank for terms like this, and then they sell those listings, the listings on their page, to SEO firms and companies. Back when Moz was a consulting company many, many years ago, they'd call us up and they'd say, "Hey, do you want to be number 3, we can make you number 3 on the best SEO companies list for $20,000 a year. Or we can make you number 1, but you're going to have to pay $75,000 a year."

That is not a great... I mean it's a great model for them. Don't get me wrong. But that pay-to-play scheme is not trustworthy for you as a consumer of SEO companies. You would never trust someone that said, "Oh well, what's the best restaurant in this particular region?" You'd never go to a list where the restaurants just paid. That would give you the conglomerates and the people who can afford to spend the most and the worst. Don't trust those types of lists.

There are a few lists, there are a few websites, places like getcredo.com run by John Doherty. There's obviously Moz's recommended SEO list, which is just my personal recommendations and the recommendations of my network. You can't pay to be on there. You can't pay to be listed. Some of those are more trustworthy. We'll try and link to a few of those good ones at the end of this whiteboard.

Mistake #3: Believing there's a "secret sauce"

Mistake number three is believing the sales pitch that unfortunately many I'm going to say low-quality SEO consultants use, which is there's a secret sauce. There are no secret sauces in SEO. If you hear like, "This is how Google works blah, blah, blah, and then here's how we do our secret optimization techniques. I can't tell you what those are. It's a proprietary methodology, but it works really well," that's baloney. You should reject that. If you ask, "How do you do it," and they say, "I'm sorry I can't tell you, it's a secret or it's proprietary," that is a very, very bad sign. No one has a secret proprietary process. SEO is a very, very open field. It's well understood. It has origins in a lot of secrecy, but that is not the way it is today and you should never accept that as an answer. That is a red flag.

My recommended process for choosing an SEO company:

Step 1

I want you to establish, sit down with your team, with your CEO, with your executive team, your board, whoever you've got, and figure out the goals you're trying to achieve with SEO. Why do you want to do SEO? Why do you want to rank organically for keywords? Then, figure out how you're going to judge success versus failure. In this process, there are good goals and bad goals.

Good goals:

I want to get in front of a lot of people who are researching this, and so we need traffic from these specific groups. I know that they perform searches for this. Great.

We're trying to boost revenue, and we're trying to boost it through new sales and SEO is a sales driving channel. Fine, great.

We're trying to boost downloads or free sign-ups or free trials. Also a fine goal.

We're trying to boost sentiment for our brand. Maybe if you Googled some of our branded terms today, there are some poor reviews, there's lots of good reviews that rank below them, and we want to push the good reviews up and the bad reviews down. Fine. Sentiment, that could be something you're driving as well. You know a lot of people are researching your brand or branded terms. Those are all good goals.

Bad goals:

We just want traffic, more traffic. Why? Well, because we want it. Terrible, terrible goal. Traffic is not a goal in and of itself. If you say, "Well, we want more traffic because we know search traffic converts well for us and here are the statistics on it," fine, terrific. Now it's a revenue driving thing.

Rankings alone, unfortunately this is a vanity thing that many people have where they want to rank for something simply because they want to rank for it. Usually a bad sign for SEO companies considering clients. You shouldn't have that on your goals list. That's not a positive goal.

Beating a particular competitor out for specific keywords or phrases. Again, not a great goal. Doesn't drive directly to revenue. Doesn't drive directly to organizational goals.

Vanity metrics. I still see people who are saying, "Hey, does anyone know a great SEO company that can help bring our domain authority up or our Majestic trust flow up or, worst of all, our Google PageRank up?" Google dropped PageRank years ago. It's terrible. Vanity metrics, bad ideas too.

Step 2

Once you have a list of these good goals that you're trying to optimize for, my suggestion is that you should assemble a list of usually three to five is I think sort of the right comfort zone. You can do more if you have the bandwidth to evaluate more, but three to five, at least, consultants or agencies. Those could be by a bunch of criteria. You might say, "Hey, look we really need someone in our region so that we can meet with them in person or at least someone who can fly to us on a regular basis." Maybe that's a requirement for you. Or you might say, "That's not important. Remote is great." Fine, wonderful. You might say something like, "Our price range or our budget is this particular thing."

You want to find whatever those criteria are and make sure you've got a list of three to five folks that you can consider against one another. Have some conversations with them and dig into references.

Good sources:

Your friends and personal networks and professional networks as well.

Similar non-competitive companies. You will find that if you're, for example, in a B2B space or in an ecommerce space and there's a non-competitive ecommerce company whom you're friendly with, you can build those relationships. You should certainly already have those relationships. Talking to those folks about who they use and whether they were successful, great way to find some good people.

Industry insiders. If you're watching Whiteboard Friday here on Moz, chances are good that you follow some great SEO people on Twitter, which is a very popular network for SEOs, or that you read SEO blogs. You can reach out to some of those influential insiders with whom you have a relationship or whose opinion you really like and care about and ask them who they would recommend.

Good questions to ask:

By the way, I like asking SEO companies: What process are you going to use to accomplish our goals, and why do you use those particular processes? That's a really smart one to start with.

Ask them about their communication and reporting process. How often? What's their cadence like? What metrics do they report on? What do they need you to collect? Why do they collect those metrics? How do those match up to your goals and how do they align?

What work and resources will you have to commit internally? You should know that before you go into any arrangement, because it could get very complex. If your SEO company says, "Great here's a list of recommendations," and you say, "Fine, we don't have the development bandwidth, or we don't have the content creation bandwidth, or we don't have the visual or UI or UX exchange bandwidth to make any of those. So what do we do?" Well, now you're road blocked. You should've had that conversation much earlier in time. *By the way, SEO usually requires some intensive resource allotment. So you should plan for that ahead of time.

What do you do when things aren't working? I love asking that question, and I like asking for specific examples of when things haven't gone right and what they've done to fix that in the past and work around it.

I like asking broadly. Especially when you open a conversation, especially if you're feeling like, hey I want to get to know this company's approach to SEO and their understanding of Google, you can ask them something like, "Hey, tell me how does Google rank results, and how do you as a company influence them?" You should hear good answers about, yes, this is how Google does things, and here's how we know that and here's how we do our process of influencing those results. That's great.

Step 3

I like to recommend that folks choose on these four things:

The trust that you've established with a company. That's through references, through the conversation, through people that you've talked to in your network.

Through referrals. If you hear great referrals and you trust those referral sources, that's a wonderful signal.

Through communication style match. If your communication style, even if everything else is good, but when you have conversations, you walk away from them feeling a little frustrated, maybe you got the things you needed, but it didn't flow smoothly, I would suggest that maybe that's a cultural mismatch and you should look for another provider.

Price and contract structure. Many SEO firms have a contract structure that's month-to-month and that has a certain length of time. You should expect to pay some upfront payment and then some ongoing monthly fee. There's usually a time at which the payment will recur and the contract will renew. It's pretty similar to a lot of other services, consulting types of agreements, so you should expect that. If you're seeing very non-standard stuff, that can be a bad thing sometimes, but not always. A lot of times SEOs have more creative pricing, and that's all right.

Pro tips

Three pro tips:

If SEO needs to be a core competency at your company, bring it in-house. An agency or consultant can never do as much with as much resources, with as much communication, as someone in-house can do. Starting with a consultant externally and then bringing someone in-house is a fine way to go.

If the quality SEO folks that you're considering are too pricy, my suggestion might be to say, "Okay, how about you just advise us on the work, and we'll hire an in-house person, maybe who's more beginner-level and you coach that person?" That can work well, again especially if you have that budget to bring that person in-house.

Remember that SEO is not for everyone. SEO is extremely competitive. Page 1 gets 95% plus of the clicks. The top 3 or 4 results are getting more than 70% of those clicks, 65% or 70%. So a lot of the time, if you can't afford yet to do SEO or to engage in it seriously, it may not be all that valuable to go from ranking on page five for a lot of your key terms to page two or the bottom of page one. Unless you have the budget and the energy to really commit yourself to SEO, it might be a channel you consider later down the road.

All right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Would love to hear your thoughts on how you've picked good SEO companies in the past and the experiences you've had there. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Thanks for checking out this week's WB Friday all. My questions for the week:

What additional recommendations do you have for folks choosing an SEO vendor?

What questions (beyond those I described) would you suggest companies ask their potential SEO consultants or agencies before making a choice?

If you provide SEO services yourself, any tips for potential clients that will set them up for success?

p.s. One other item -- I struggled to find any other great lists of SEOs that aren't biased or influenced in some fashion beyond Moz's own. Does anyone else maintain a non-pay-to-play, non-affiliate list of good SEO firms?

This was a really interesting read, especially from the point of view of a digital marketing business that aims to make SEO more transparent for clients as opposed to positioning it as a 'secret sauce' - we are strong advocates of encouraging companies to bring SEO in-house and then we work alongside them to train them on a broad SEO skill set.

In response to question 2, one thing I would recommend to companies is "beware the free SEO audit". In the UK, you see plenty of companies who go around offering free SEO audits as a thinly-veiled sales pitch. These audits are solely aimed at telling a company everything that is wrong with their website, and not even tell them how they would address these issues. In addition, they also fail to say where the real business opportunity lies in terms of revenue, leads and long-term competitive advantage.

What's worse, they are more often than not re-purposed versions of one of the many online SEO audits that a company could perform themselves, using the likes of Moz, SEMRush and Ahrefs to name a few.

Sadly, the "free SEO audit" is shockingly abundant in the UK. Any agency worth their salt should take the marketing plan and work off of that. I think that the point of purpose really needs to be made when looking at any agency for anything; "fixing" SEO won't do anything, you need to work it into your greater plans.

I think asking about the link building strategy is always good. What % of a budget will be spend on LB, where do you get the links, are they eternal, will you remove the links if I stop paying. Around here there are companies that will buy subscription-based links and if you stop paying, they stop paying for backlinks and the links are removed in one day and you get a filter. So it's always good know about their link building strategy.

Yikes. Any links that can be removed are probably links you shouldn't acquire in the first place (at least, not in markets like the US where Google webspam is hyper-capable of detection and devaluation/penalization).

How do you build links without tapping into one of the paid 3rd party blogger networks? Yes, some free links through outreach are possible but that's over a longer period of time and tons of work (say 12 months).

It becomes really difficult when you are looking for quality links at a steady pace month on month but your brand is not one of the Fortune 100 or such.

First of all, I've worked on agency for years and I totally agree with this tips.

1. Have a 30 minutes meeting with the SEO guy/agency, explain your project in 10 minutes and let them talk, find coherence.

2. I usually ask for another success cases, then I study those cases and I can see if the work was well done.

3. Patience, work and trend ;)

Rand, I believe there isn't a SEO list without affiliate or pay-to-stay. I recently made a list with top50 online marketing bloggers in Spain based on Visibility Index (SEO-based if you want), at least I think it's authentic, what do you think?

1 - Beware quick results - either asking for them or being promised them is typically a bad sign. If you've worked with agencies in other channels in the past, SEO is more like PR than PPC - it's valuable but it's a long game.

2 - Ask them about how they had prepared their clients for recent trends ahead of time (e.g. right now, that might be mobile first crawling).

3 - Adding on to some of your closing thoughts, from a consulting perspective, we almost always get our best work done when working with clients who have in-house SEO staff. We can help to hire and interview those people if needed, or to train them or even to define their role, but it's difficult to be efficient (for the client or the consultants) when outsourcing your entire SEO function, or worse yet your entire marketing function.

Hi Rand, thanks for much for the Credo shoutouts! I definitely pride myself on putting together a list of only the highest quality agencies and consultants, and really focus on the ones who do great work with SMB budgets as well.

A bit about the Credo process for getting onto the platform:

It is a subscription product for pros on the platform, however their rankings are not affected at all by the level they are on (levels are seen here - getcredo.com/pros/). Instead, rankings are determined by number and quality of reviews (they can seed up to 3 when they get on the platform initially), completeness of their profile, time to response to leads, and more. So it's merit-based, not pay-to-play (I know you said that, but wanted to give a bit more insight into how it works).

Before a pro is even allowed on the site, they have to jump through a few hoops:

First they have to fill out a form to even see if they are the right type of agency/consultant for Credo.

If they are a fit, then they have to schedule and have a 30 minute phone call with me, which is basically a qualitative check into if they're good on the phone and thus will provide the level of communication I expect agencies and consultants to have with their clients. There have been multiple pros that I have not allowed on Credo because of this, or they do certain work (such as greyhat linkbuilding tactics) that I am not comfortable with.

Once that's through, then they are given a link to sign up for Credo. Then they fill out a big long form (I ask for a lot of information) that is used to populate their public profile.

They also have to give me the URLs of two of their current or past clients and a project description, which I then run through SEMrush/OSE/etc to verify that their clients are going in the right direction. If there are any questions in my mind I reach out to the pro and ask those questions.

Once that's through, they are set live.

Thanks for spreading the word and helping people cut through the noise and ask the right questions! A few more links that might be helpful:

"If SEO needs to be a core competency at your company, bring it in-house. An agency or consultant can never do as much with as much resources, with as much communication, as someone in-house can do. Starting with a consultant externally and then bringing someone in-house is a fine way to go."

Transparency: I'm an agency person.

My .02, in-house + agency = extra win.

In my experience, it's rare that a single in-house pro can do more than an agency. If a company wants to take it all in-house, it's probably going to require a team.

No doubt that an experienced, knowledgeable in-house point person can be a huge asset to the agency-client relationship.

This would come down to the size of the company & their dedication to SEO.

Knowledgeable in-house point person will keep the Agency on its toes while also being able to bring the process and new knowledge into the company. I have played this similar role in middleware integration many times - it works really well. I can definitely see it working really well for SEO. So many advantages to this.

Change customer's mindset is the biggest challenge for SEO consultant. My experience with new customers is like this; around 70% customers ask me first question, when shall I get first page ranking in google? Everybody is looking for ranking only, they don't understand the importance of targeted traffic on website.

This video is especially timely (I was shocked and grateful to see the recent date!) as I'll be having 4 interviews with SEO consultants this week. The discussion points you brought up are very useful, and things already seem to be off to a solid start with our goals, existing traction, team, etc heading into these conversations.

I'm glad you mentioned Credo. I called Distilled yesterday, based on Moz's list, and while they serve bigger companies than mine, they were so gracious and led me to Credo. John at Credo, again, very gracious, and I got four appointments set up within the day today. All wonderful companies, it looks like. It will be hard to choose!

When I was first looking last week, I did the whole, "Well if they rank highly on Google, they must be good," and ended up talking to a real snake oil type guy. So I went to Moz, knowing you guys are on the up-and-up. Good people over here. Thank you!

Its truly amazing how much spam I receive daily with that very promise. I would add to that, don't sign with anyone who spams you. If they're willing to spam to get your business, they will likely spam your links to get cheap, fast results.

What additional recommendations do you have for folks choosing an SEO vendor?

I have suggestion - Don't just look at "Year of Experience", "Testimonials", "Completed projects", etc that is written on their website. Believe me, these information are not always right, people making fool to clients by adding fake testimonials, years of experience and successfully completed projects. So, DONT just go with them by seeing the numbers, TALK to them and listen what they can deliver for you.

What questions (beyond those I described) would you suggest companies ask their potential SEO consultants or agencies before making a choice?

What's the profit we can expect in 6 months or beyond (Whatever time-frame SEO agency giving you) ?. Because, keywords ranking in top 10 is not equals to conversion/costumer/profit. And sometimes you can get costumers without ranking in top 10 (By Quora answers, recommendations on business directories, comments, etc). So, always look for profit that you gonna make rather than worried about the Traffic, Ranking , etc. It's their job to deliver a better ROI, let they decide how would they do. But yes, keep monitoring what's going on because you are paying them.

If you provide SEO services yourself, any tips for potential clients that will set them up for success?

Yes, I have a wonderful tips, please read this - I had one client who was a local clinic dentist. I provided him 2 keywords with search volume around 500. His charge was $70 for each patient to check and I said, you will make minimum $30k to $35k per month in coming 5 months by ranking at the top on these keywords. This way, client increased the budget from $650 to $1000 and told me that I am looking forward. So, I suggest never try to negotiate the price otherwise you will get only Links. Just for for taking your business to the next level rather than paying for links that won't help.

There are many things I can suggest but that would look like a article ;)

There are many great points in this article. I am particularly interested in the point about asking an SEO firm - "What work and resources will you have to commit internally?" as a company seeking recommendations. There are companies that offer SEO services who can make recommendations and also implement them as well on the client's behalf. That might be a better way to go for companies who are not interested in bringing SEO in-house and who would rather hire a 'one-stop shop'. I think it would be smart to look for an SEO firm who also offers content, and maybe even design and development. Conversely, you can find top-notch content writers who offer SEO services as well, and that might be a great fit for a company who would rather have all the work done on their behalf.

Really happy to see an authority talking about this again! I'm currently doing my PhD, with a focus on instilling/improving standards within the digital marketing/SEO industry. I've been collecting insights from Clients (as well as Practitioners for a balanced view). As an ex-practitioner I understand there are always two sides to every story, but some of the horror stories involving maltreatment, bad practice and poor decisions on behalf of both parties have been upsetting to hear. Reference to a guide/piece like this would have benefitted the prospective client greatly before they had signed on the dotted line. If anyone is interested in talking about this or contributing to the research it would be great to hear from you. Thanks again!

Great WBF, I'll have to restrain myself from name-dropping my agency ha!

One thing you touched briefly on but is vitally important is to see if the client is capable of implementing necessary changes. In previous jobs, I've had clients land on my lap and the first thing I'll say is that they need a new website or spend thousands modifying a restrictive CMS. This obviously helps no one and has led to more than a couple grey hairs. If a website is too problematic to work on, it needs to be brought up at sales stage. If a new site is needed, then we need to detail exactly why and provide advice on what is needed and perhaps offer a cheaper consultancy service. Unfortunately, many agencies will exploit this to sell a new website when its not needed.

As part of a relatively 'newer' SEO agency, this is a pretty invaluable post to better understand how to market our services - very much appreciated.

I think it's certainly become the case that transparency is paramount with your clients, and ensuring that there is an understanding of what is required from both parties. Using marketing plans not only helps to show value in what SEO (such a broad term these days) can provide to a client, but it shows that it isn't all just a numbers game and we can hook into your goals, helping make them a reality.

As always, a stellar post Rand! I'll be passing this on to colleagues for sure.

Hiring SEO consultants/ agencies are not a piece of cake. It's a challenging task, you need to analyse lots of factor before hiring them and if you are selecting any SEO consultant on the basis of testimonials page, online reviews, feedback you are going to a wrong track I must say and also, don't get fool by adopting those agencies who promises you to bring you in top ranking within short time frame. SEO is not getting on the front page within less time. If SEO needs to be a core competency at your company, bring it in-house. Exactly what I feel the same, the way we do our SEO in-house, it can't be done by any other agencies. Bringing it in-house is a wonderful way to go.

It's not only in case of hiring SEO company but also it happens in every case, through referral we always get best services. And one thing more, before few days I had a conversation with my SEO team leader that why we need in house SEO that time he also had replyed the same whatever you said in this point: If SEO needs to be a core competency at your company, bring it in-house. Nice post it is, thanks for sharing it because whatever questions you have suggested to ask before hiring a SEO company will help us a lot to give the answer properly.

Your assertion that the companies that usually rank high are the not so good ones and the goods ones are so busy they don’t have time to optimize their website is wildly assumptive and not provable. Moreover, I am constantly analyzing our own competition and I have found that their websites are often littered with bad page optimization and SEO. For example, many sites have no clickable phone number that will bring up a dialer. It takes mere seconds to change the code and make a phone number clickable which makes it easier for visitors to contact you. This is one example of many. And if an SEO cannot lead by example, then how are they going to lead their customers to the promised land of the first page organic and local pack listings?

I'm pretty passionate about helping companies find the right SEO firm to work with as there is so much crap out there and so many businesses who don't understand SEO enough to know what's good and what's bad. Far too much pulling the wool over the eyes for my liking.

It's a shame there is no governing body to weed out the crap. Maybe one day there will be.

Anyhoo, I wrote this for the same reason you created this WBF, to help folks separate the wheat from the chaff and find the good guys and girls to work with. Some of the questions I recommend folks should ask also echo yours:

Even on the paid media or even content we see a lot of pulling the wool over someone's eyes and telling a potential client what they would want to hear to win the deal. Client education is paramount to knowing who they can and can't hire to do the job.

Agreed, but with SEO, the wool can be pulled for a longer period of time. It's easier for a client to see paid media is being done badly as it's instant. Or easier to see a piece of content doesn't cut it so the client can make a call sooner. But with SEO, due to its slow ramp up, clients can be in the dark for longer. Not cool.

In my opinion, clients need a lot of help learning what is an isn't good. Educating themselves for 4 weeks before they make a choice isn't always enough to make the right choice as I've seen a few times.

That's why I think there should be a governing body for this sort of thing where you can go to get trusted providers, just like you can with plumbers for example, or golf pros etc.

Yeah not easy. If I were a company that didn't know much/anything about SEO, I would pay a reputable SEO professional to recruit the agency for me/recruit in-house. Someone who is unbiased and isn't pitching for the job but has the credentials of a great professional.

really enjoyed the video, a lot of good stuff. Always something interesting on Whiteboard Friday.

The only point I didn't really agree with was bringing the SEO in-house. This is mainly because I think my clients and yours travel in different circles.

I run a small SEO company in Ireland and service small to medium sized companies. They just don't have it in their budgets to hire an experienced SEO person, or even someone to train over time. In a small business ( 20 people or less) normally everybody is so busy that it is a relief to be able to hand over the responsibility to a company like mine. I get the feeling that your small companies are a bit larger and have more money to invest. Nothing wrong with that! but as long as there are small companies there will be a need for agencies.

Above all, I think being as a customer, we should first spend few hours to educate ourselves about SEO so that we could ask some better relevant questions to service providers and can understand their wordings as well. This will confirm how much knowledge they really have about this.

We can also pick the clients, they have served for. Pick their details from portfolio and contact them just to have a little bit of feedback about SEO firms. I hope that none of them will have problem to give their true feedback about the service provider they already satisfied from. Better to call them in their free time.

As a long time MOZ follower here, I've rarely ever disagreed with Rand. This time however, I do.

I don't believe agencies/consultants who rank highly is because "they have nothing else to do" and "need clients". In fact, I would argue that is not the case at all. Just like every SERP out there, not all results are perfect. But I find it contradictory to state that all the good companies are "too busy" with clients and have too much work to optimize their own website.

In fact, I would strongly suggest that the good ones should be able to prove their are able to rank not only their clients, but their own website as well.

It's also kind of elitist to say "were so good and busy we don't have time for our own SEO". Its kinda silly perspective to have.

Hey Rand Fishkin, am Akinyemi of Climaxbox Digital Marketing Agency am glad to read and watch your Video . But i do not agree with you, that Google is not a Good Filter for a professional service such has "SEO" .

In your statement below

"But, unfortunately, what happens is most of the very good companies, the ones that are in high demand, the ones that do consistently great work and get great referrals, they don't actually need to rank here. They're overwhelmed with clients all the time because their clients refer them to people and lots of people in their network refer folks to them. They have a high retention of clients. Lots of people are very satisfied. They're making plenty of money and they're incredibly busy, so they don't spend any work optimizing their own website to get new clients."

Are you saying Top brands, Local businesses or Clients who have good sales should not bother to Rank on Search engines? Don't you think they are also throwing a lot of sales to other Competitors ?

Let's be realistic no matter how much sales Companies or Local Businesses owners make , they still try as much as possible to expand and increase sales .

My point is , getting enough clients does not make a SEO Firm ignore the fact that he can still increase his Conversion rate through Search Marketing (Paid or Organic) . So if an SEO Company does not show on Top Search result , let me say can not take the Lead by ranking for his/her firm first , should not bother to encourage his/her clients to do Search Marketing either Paid or Organic(SEO).

For those on the Search engine list to be Top listed , despite the Competition then they are good to go . It means they will be able to Convert the same energy and do the Clients Job . If a Firm Complains there was no time to optimize his own Company website then he won't have time to Optimize Clients website.

I actually do not agree with your Point you stipulated has the First mistake . Cheers!

1-Have a face-to-face interview with the SEO consultant and look him in the eye to see if he really lies through a series of issues we will ask him about: new changes, some practices that we make that we suspect are not appropriate, etc.

2-The best practice is to show your best results and how you have obtained them.

3-Patience and work. Do not want to run because you can penalize your attitude.

Great video Rand and i salute always your knowledge. I have a concern regarding seo that most of the companies are using paid links and generating reciprocal links secretly. If a person wants to start seo own basis without spent any coin then how can we make it possible, please write about it also.

I totally agree with your mistake no.3 Rand - I once had a discussion with a friend who came to me completely mesmerized with this "web guy", as he called him, that told him that he knows "the secret hack" on how to trick Google and make his business website no.1 in like 3 minutes of his work!

At that time, my friend was just considering an option on starting a small business and creating a website for it. Now, I wasn't shocked that my friend bought it - as he had no idea about SEO, but I was shocked by the amount of this massive insolence and zero shame that this "web guy" had and what he was willing to do to trick people just to get some money out of it...!

After I explained to my friend how this guy was wrong and how SEO is not some government slash Google thing hidden under the veil of secrecy, he saw the picture way clearer, but still had this little seed of curiosity about that guy and his "secret hack"... He did take my advice at the end, of course, but my problem was that he was still curious about this guy...It's really important not to let yourself get hooked on that kinda stories!

BTW I'm not in SEO business myself but again, I do think that every experienced SEO wizard holds an ace up his sleeve ;)

SEO isn't for everyone? Disagree with that. Yes, there are other options to budget for in generating traffic but the core principals of SEO should underpin any web strategy.

I think you'd have been better suggesting that investing in an SEO consultancy / agency isn't for everyone, but SEO itself is. Even for local businesses - how can they compete? They make their strategy hyper local and focus on the stack / listings / reviews etc.

As you say, aiming for ranks isn't what you should be aiming for - so why dismiss SEO on grounds that 70% of clicks are top 3 listings?

I hear you. My issue is that with dozens or even hundreds of websites competing for the same keywords, only a handful can be successful. You might say there's more opportunity in the long tail, and I agree, but still, at some point, in many fields, a few winners (maybe only 5-10, maybe 10-50, but probably not many 100s) will rise to the top and own a significant portion of the SERPs. Given that, if you or your company aren't willing to be in the top echelon and do the work required to get there, you might consider other paths for your web marketing. Content marketing, social media, press, paid channels, email, offline advertising, etc. are all opportunities for business generation (along with many others). No one can be great at all of them, so you have to choose what matches your strengths, your audience's preferences, and your company's ROI.

Thanks for the reply. I understand where you're coming from and you are right, but like you say, when the competition is really high, you can find another opportunity through long tail or whichever other aspect of SEO is right for you.

I just think there is a contradiction of sorts in using examples of competing for high volume keywords against hundreds of strong competitors as a reason not to invest in SEO, and at the same time suggesting that this is a 'bad goal' when looking for an SEO agency.

Fully respect where you're coming from, but I think the best SEOs will be honest, indicate there's no point competing for those keywords at this stage and present an alternative long term plan to improve organic traffic.

As we all know, (and part of the beauty of SEO as far as I'm concerned) if you do any of the other aspects of web marketing well, chances are your performance in SERPs will inevitably improve. If alongside that you have a seriously under-optimised site, you won't benefit as much as you would have if your SEO game was on point too.

1)You can check whether their website itself ranks in Google or not. Check for seo+ province For example For example, an SEO agency/freelancer in a location, check keywords “SEO location” and “location SEO”.You can also try “SEO consultant location” or “seo company location” and shortlist the SEO consultants and companies appearing in the top 20 positions or so.This however does not mean that each and every one of these companies or individuals (that rank at the top) is good, expert or best

However for SEO's who are not yet experts getting these top rankings gives good visibility and additional clients and it is recommended by experts like Neil Patel when he wrote in "5 Tactics to Turn a Small SEO Agency Into a National Force""First, focus on winning your local SEO terms. For example, if you were an SEO agency in Denver, you would want to win the keywords “seo Denver” and “Denver seo”.

This means if you are on a budget you can find a few good freelance consultants among those ranking on top who can do a good job but you must investigate further .

2) You can also check out author profiles at other reputed industry websites and recommended SEO consultants by leading SEO Websites: For example Moz has a list of leading SEO Blogs as well as a list of recommended consultants. You can then add the consultants /companies listed here to your shortlist. However the top consultants and companies do not come cheap

3) Second check what they have written on their website or on well know SEO websites about SEO. It is a very good practice to check what a short-listed SEO company has written on their website. This will give you some idea about the knowledge that they have.

4) See if they follow the search engine's guidelines

5) Do not choose anyone who sends an email out of the blue or cold calls.

6) Check the previous work - Ask the SEO to provide screenshots of rankings obtained for previous clients and see if they have any case studies written on their website.

7) According to Google: No one can guarantee a particular ranking & be careful of companies who will will not inform you of the changes they do to your website.

8) Also remember that SEO is a long term process any any SEO who plays by the rules cannot get results overnight.

I read similar kind of post few years before and I take some points from I hope that will add additional value here also.

As per my previous experience usually many so call SEO companies provide you, good manager, as they good in communications but not an experienced SEO. So take your managers interview first before buying their service, judge your manager’s knowledge level while he is judging yours. No doubt, if u get the chance to work with someone with excellent knowledge of SEO, ur job is only going to be less difficult and more productive +chance of learning new skills all the time.

The best way to trust someone is either through a personal reference or through a good interview. It’s better to ask a company how exactly they do SEO and then test markets their SEO strategies, instead of cross checking all their references and trusting them blindly after that. This filter is independent of company’s size and market value. I think it’s a very good way to separate the wheat from the chaff and it will also give opportunities to those SEOs who really know their work but don't have a big name.

Thank you so much for this. I am just starting an online marketing firm for small businesses. Doing a competitive analysis I basically found large marketing firms that have a solid staff and portfolio and have seen some down and dirty sites that rank high for SEO Phoenix in my google search of competitors. I really did not see them as competition because their sites were so vague and they lacked any examples of their work or real reviews.

After watching this I decided I am going to include a page on my site talking about how to choose a marketing agency (yay! research time). This whiteboard Friday post will definitely be one of my external links. However, I am also going to review some of the larger firms with links to their sites to showcase some other firms that I think are doing good work.

One of my biggest pet peeves with agencies are the ones with super strict terms and conditions. "We own everything about your site, the layout, pictures, content, farts, and feel." Put those design costs in your fees, don't shackle your customer. Work with them if they discuss their unhappiness with you...and let them go if they want, with their site.

Hi, Rand. Another great video. The questions you listed to ask potential SEO consultants / agencies are some that I've never been asked before but would love it if someone did. Too many times I've worked with clients who want to do SEO for SEO's sake. They have no goals in mind, they just think this is something they need to do. Or you come across a client who will accept nothing less than number one organic in Google as success, while turning a blind eye to the user experience of their own website.

On another note, I do have to take issue with some of the earlier comments regarding Free SEO site audits. They seem to be coming from UK visitors so I'm not sure what's going on over there, but I think that is a fairly common practice here. I offer a free audit as part of my services. There's nothing underhanded about it. At least not what I do. My audit runs through a checklist of about 70 items. From there I hand this off to the customer and make myself available to answer to every line item regarding how this impacts their search results and if there is room for improvement on their site.

Armed with this information the client can hire me or simply go on their way. Of course I'd love to work with them. I feel that by offering this level of transparency and honesty (no secret sauces) that clients can learn to trust me and learn more about my services.

I guess my point is I'd hate to be lumped in with a bad crowd simply by offering a free SEO audit. Just as much as most people reading this article don't want to be lumped in with "black hat" SEO agencies and consultants.

Well said John. In fact I've just started offering a free SEO audit and I've not seen many other similar offers. I find it hard to believe it only happens in the UK - in fact to make it less difficult to understand, or mystical, I call it a "website health check". It's certainly got me some business, helps me promote my business and knowledge, and it's a real opportunity to explain the whole process of what's involved in website performance, creating content, traffic sources, ranking, types of content etc. etc., and that certain elements like on-page SEO are completely under the client's control. It isn't, and shouldn't be, a mystery.

I think one of the problems are the free tools: all you need do is pop in your details and out pops a magic number. In my experience most businesses simply don't understand on-page SEO, and it's completely understandable why - in much the same way that I don't always understand theirs but after they explain it ... hey presto!.

Loved Pro Tip #2! I do this with a lot of my clients. I like working this way....I like to teach....and it's generally going to end up being good value for the client, AND grows the skills of their in-house person. Win all around!

There IS a "secret sauce" to ranking... though I will not go to those levels to do it... All you need to do is search for something that *ornHub ranks for, and that is anything adult as we all know. Click on the link... they probably are #1, 2 and 3 lol, let the page load, then try to click back on your browser button. They got ya! *ornHub probably has a 0-10% bounce rate, and it works for many others as well... Keep in mind you do need to have some authority, but I continue to see more and more BS sites with extremely thin crap content outrank great sites doing this. I am not into tricking people, or making their internet experience annoying, so sadly this is something I can not implement on my end. Oh, and I have asked everywhere, if this type of trickery is against Googles Terms of Service (as it should be) and no where will they give a direct answer Yes or No... Not even in GWF will any employee of Google touch the question, you will only get replies from people who think they know if it is or not and even that is 50/50. HAHA So test at your own risk, I guess.

Ethically, it's also important that your SEO company is not also representing your direct competitors. I see too many SEO companies specializing in a niche (like lawyers), and then trying to sell ALL personal injury lawyers in a city their SEO services. An ethical SEO company will only represent ONE client in each specific niche market (this could be geographic as well), and use all their skills and talents to help you dominate that space.

Is second year when we use MOZ for advice and I do all seo by myself in our agency.

We do a taxi service and before our website was unknown. By now I managed ranking for a few very important keywords on the top at first page and we get a lot of customers and booking for our service.

It seems strange to me that now every week I get average two emails from different SEO companies which they offer their service.

Before when i need SEO noone but now a lot of them and all they need to do is they need to put my keyword from title in google and they will see we rank very good and that wee do not need theirs service. Their emails are so poorly done with no actualy research of our website that is kinda funny how amateur they are.

What beginners have to keep in mind is that an SEO campaign gets long-term results, that we must go little by little but then those results remain visible in time. That yes, we must not neglect SEO throughout the life of our projects, since we will always have to continue working until we get consolidated in number 1 if possible.

This is a great way to choose an agency, some of our clients just want to rank high on one keyword and if they are not seeing results on that specific keyword they got upset. Definitely will try to implement some of this recommendations.

Good stuff. A company I know of were recently advised by an 'expert' that creating pages talking about 'local areas' - almost like a tourist guide - would help them sell more medical products. Especially as he hadn't targeted keywords and site visitors weren't meant to see the page - the content was 'just for SEO purposes'.

Well, obviously, I'm not Rand XD, sorry, but interested in what you posted. Why wouldn't SEO (as well as all the other factors that can push you upwards) be for everyone? I.e. in my world, there's always some work to be done. Always.

Been an in-house for 8 years, started my agency three years ago (free time exercise).

I can't tell you how helpful this video was! I FINALLY have something with a lot of authority to show my potential clients who ask me, "Why aren't you ranking for SEO bla bla bla." In addition to pointing them to my current clients' successes, I can now send a quick link to this extremely digestible video. You rock, Rand. Amazing!

Very well-said, Rand! An SEO company that ranks high on Google may not necessarily be the best at what it does. Paid marketing makes things even riskier. I’ve also observed the “secret sauce” mantra to be unreal- as we all know SEO is a complex field.

When hiring an SEO agency or independent consultant, it is a good idea to look for their experience. If a company has been in SEO businesses for quite some time (say 10 years or so), you’ll have some assurance with regards to their quality of work.

If I need to choose in between Content marketing, social media, press, paid channels, email, offline advertising and SEO I will definitely go with SEO as it demands less investment. Only few hours of research and study can provide you better results.

Nice Rand. Sent this to a few SEO consultant friends I've. I would have loved to see more around the creative pricing aspect, however, I know that's not the point of this WBF.

Would love a future WBF to be about the blurring lines between SEO and PPC. We are seeing more paid inside local packs from Google. The next year could see Google have more paid ads within what was once a pure SEO related SERP.

I find so much of this to be true and valuable for organizations who are just getting started with SEO and are not sure where to find the proper assistance with strategy and direction for their business.

I can relate to not having time to boost our website's rankings because we are too busy working with current clients on their SEO. In fact, I often find local marketing companies ranking for SEO, that really do not have it at their core capabilities.

One thing I would add to this is when looking for an SEO company to assist you, make sure you have a sound marketing plan and clear goals that you want to achieve with SEO. If you let the SEO company make these decisions, or if they make the decisions without you having specific goals, you are likely going to have a poor experience.

Great Info Rand! Funny I had a recent client ask "I can't find you ranked as BEST SEO AGENCY?" ..lol...

I do see a small uptick on companies hiring newer in-house SEO staff, though it makes me wonder if in the long term it will end up costing them more than working with an agency with its combined team skill-set and experience. Again great Whiteboard Friday!

Thanks Rand! This is such a fitting WBF for where I am at right now. In terms of going forward with looking for a partner/agency, from the perspective of a mid-large size business, what do you think is more valuable?

1. A very reputable SEO agency.

2. Being a whale for a smaller agency.

In an environment where we strive to find partners who jive with our culture, we want to make sure that 1. We aren't just a number in their growing list of clients, but 2. We're getting the best product/recommendations we can possible get. - Or maybe I have that backwards? What do you guys think?

Some review companies actively search for companies to review and rank. Some companies don't wait for design companies to come to them. Some companies reach out to clients of design companies to get reviews without the design company's permission.

Good tips, Rand! My favorite... Mistake #2: Trusting "Top SEO" lists, hahah. Too many SEO agencies create their own lists, so as you say is not a good search criteria. In my opinion, the most important thing is to find an agency that is interested in your business and that tries to help you not only for economic reasons, but also as part of your project. Thank you very much, Rand!